Radiation, highly coherent, spectroscopy method

Most of the vibrational and rotational spectra obtained before the second world war were measured using Raman methods. Interest in Raman then declined as infrared and microwave absorption instrumentation developed, but the introduction of visible lasers in the early 1960s has led to dramatic renaissance in Raman spectroscopy. As well as decreasing the acquisition time and increasing the sensitivity of conventional Raman spectra by orders of magnitude, the high power and coherence properties of laser radiation has spawned a host of new nonlinear Raman spectroscopies, some of which can be performed without a... 

For the last 10 years these methods have been extended into the optical region, taking advantage of sufficiently intense coherent radiation sources provided by pulsed lasers. Time-resolved coherent optical spectroscopy has rapidly developed into an important branch of high-resolution laser spectroscopy [11.32a,b]. 

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